personas: add Travolta, Fantasy Narrative Author

DEVLOG.md

@@ -5,6 +5,47 @@ Auto-maintained via Claude devlog skill. Entries are reverse-chronological.
 
 ---
 
+## [2026-09-04] Travolta writes the prose Tracy refuses to, and the fantasy lane closes
+
+**Category:** `milestone`
+**Tags:** `personas`, `travolta`, `d20mob`, `narrative`, `naming`, `lane-discipline`
+
+**Risk Level:** `low`
+**Breaking Change:** `no`
+
+### Summary
+
+The Tracy entry recorded an unowned seat: nobody on the roster wrote fantasy prose. Travolta takes it as Fantasy Narrative Author, the Ernie analogue for fantasy. Roster is twenty. `tests/run.sh` 296/296.
+
+### Detail
+
+**The gap was specific, not theoretical.** The d20Mob Engagement Analysis names five shipping content surfaces with no author: DM Dialogue (the narrator line that fires on a streak or a first kill), lore encounters at 15% of the encounter mix, lore fragments gating Boss Discovery, the tiered bestiary reveal across Identified, Studied and Mastered, and earned titles. The Brand Identity Guide fixes the register at "authoritative but inviting, like a well-written sourcebook", explicitly not corporate and not casual-mobile.
+
+**Every adjacent lane was already closed, in writing.** Ernie is the WW2 Narrative Author and his standards rest on historical verification against Cornelius, which has no fantasy equivalent. Toni owns positioning, and Ernie's own profile routes marketing away with "card copy is not ad copy". Iris says it outright: "you do not decide what the brand should say, only what it should look like." Tracy adjudicates canon and writes nothing. Reiner decides whether a mechanic earns its place, not how it reads. That left the seat genuinely empty rather than merely unassigned.
+
+**The behaviors are Ernie's, retuned for a different failure mode.** Ernie's *Sensory Ground Truth* and *Fact then Meaning* both exist to stop invention, because his genre punishes getting it wrong. Fantasy punishes getting it ornate. So Travolta carries *The Screen Budget* (state the surface and its cap before drafting; a line that overflows is unfinished rather than long), *Read It Aloud* (the mouth catches what the eye forgives, and fantasy invites a cadence that scans silently and stumbles spoken), and *Kill the Adjective*, which is Ernie's *Kill Your Darlings* pointed at decoration rather than at overreach.
+
+**One lane rule is unusually hard.** Travolta may not invent a creature, place, spell, or item name without routing it to Tracy first, and prose that ships an unlicensed name is defined as a bug in the prose. That is the reciprocal of the seat Tracy already holds, and Tracy's routing bullet now names Travolta in return, so the loop closes both ways the way Cornelius and Ernie's does.
+
+**The name breaks convention on purpose.** Every other persona encodes its lineage in a luminary's forename: Reiner is Knizia, Cornelius is Ryan, Ernie is Pyle, Tracy is Hickman. Travolta is a surname with no fantasy connection. It comes from a typo in the request that started this work ("Salvatore travolta"), the maintainer chose to keep it, and nothing in the tooling cares: `bin/claude-team` and `generate-agents.sh` split the title on its em dash and never parse the name, and eight characters fits the coordinator greeting table's ten-wide name field.
+
+**Placement followed the Rez precedent rather than the Ernie one.** Travolta is an Ernie analogue and Ernie sits in the Game Development Team, but that section's argument is built on a closed, interlocking set of four for a WW2 studio. Widening it to five would weaken a deliberately constructed argument, which is the same call made when Rez landed. Travolta sits in the main roster after Tracy, and the README's studio-adjacency note now covers all three outsiders.
+
+### Decisions Made
+
+- **Made this a separate seat rather than widening Ernie.** Ernie's craft transfers; his standards do not, since they are built on a verification relationship with Cornelius that fantasy has no equivalent for. Widening him would have produced a persona whose hard rules applied to half its own domain.
+- **Kept the maintainer's name over the convention.** Travolta was flagged as a departure that loses the lineage signal, with Salvatore offered as the one-word swap that would keep it. The maintainer chose Travolta. Recorded here so a future reader finds a decision rather than an inconsistency.
+- **Wrote the name-routing rule as a prose defect, not a courtesy.** "Prose that ships an unlicensed name is a bug in the prose" puts the obligation on the writer rather than on a reviewer downstream. This is the mechanism that makes the Tracy pairing load-bearing instead of advisory.
+- **Marked the Tracy proposal's section 6 resolved in place rather than deleting it.** The reasoning for why the seat was deferred is worth keeping; only its status changed.
+
+### Related
+
+- `docs/proposals/d20mob-genre-advisor.md` section 6, now marked resolved
+- [2026-09-04] Tracy joins as the fantasy counterpart to Rez — the entry that recorded this gap
+- [2026-07-27] Game Development Team: four new personas — the Ernie profile this is built on
+
+---
+
 ## [2026-09-04] Tracy joins as the fantasy counterpart to Rez, and Reiner absorbs the d20 lane
 
 **Category:** `milestone`

README.md

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ That's what this is.
 
 `claude-team-cli` gives you a crew of named, specialized Claude personas, each one a formal expert consultant with deep domain knowledge, a distinct way of thinking, and enterprise-grade security instincts baked in. You pick who's on the task, and Claude shows up as that person.
 
-Need to define requirements? Call River. Design an API? Akira. Building a component that has to be accessible and secure? That's Sasha's world. Need a mockup before anyone writes code? Kai will have a device-frame HTML wireframe in your browser before the discussion goes abstract. Data pipelines or ML ops? Jordan. Dashboards and metrics? Casey. Security review or threat model? Morgan. Designing your deployment pipeline? Alex. Writing tests? Robin's got it. Planning a launch? Toni. Making sure everything actually ships on time? Quinn. Figuring out how to form your company, manage finances, or avoid legal landmines? That's Sage. Need a logo, an icon set, or marketing art? Iris. Building a tabletop game? Reiner designs the mechanics, Cornelius keeps the history honest, Ernie writes the flavor, and Piper plays it until it breaks. Building inside a genre? Rez tells you what has already been done with that name, that trope, and that look, and whether the reference you want is free to take. Building fantasy? Tracy does the same for fifty years of dungeons, and knows which monster names the SRD actually lets you ship.
+Need to define requirements? Call River. Design an API? Akira. Building a component that has to be accessible and secure? That's Sasha's world. Need a mockup before anyone writes code? Kai will have a device-frame HTML wireframe in your browser before the discussion goes abstract. Data pipelines or ML ops? Jordan. Dashboards and metrics? Casey. Security review or threat model? Morgan. Designing your deployment pipeline? Alex. Writing tests? Robin's got it. Planning a launch? Toni. Making sure everything actually ships on time? Quinn. Figuring out how to form your company, manage finances, or avoid legal landmines? That's Sage. Need a logo, an icon set, or marketing art? Iris. Building a tabletop game? Reiner designs the mechanics, Cornelius keeps the history honest, Ernie writes the flavor, and Piper plays it until it breaks. Building inside a genre? Rez tells you what has already been done with that name, that trope, and that look, and whether the reference you want is free to take. Building fantasy? Tracy does the same for fifty years of dungeons, and knows which monster names the SRD actually lets you ship. And when the lore itself needs writing, Travolta writes it: the narrator's voice, the bestiary entries, the line that fires on a seven-day streak.
 
 ### How it works in practice
 
@@ -99,6 +99,7 @@ Specialists for building and shipping a product, and a studio below for tabletop
 | Iris | Brand & Illustration | Logos, icon sets, illustration, marketing graphics, asset licensing |
 | Rez | Cyberpunk Genre Advisor | Genre precedent, name and term collisions, homage versus cliché, what to read or watch |
 | Tracy | Fantasy Genre Advisor | Fantasy and D&D canon, SRD versus Product Identity, monster and class name status, what to read or run |
+| Travolta | Fantasy Narrative Author | Lore fragments, bestiary entries, narrator lines, earned titles, sourcebook voice |
 
 Full profiles for the whole roster are in [TEAM.md](TEAM.md).
 
@@ -113,7 +114,7 @@ A four-person studio for card and board game projects. The four hold their lanes
 | Ernie | WW2 Narrative Author | Flavor text, mission briefings, card copy, historical prose |
 | Piper | Tabletop Playtester | Session reports, dominant lines, balance swings, first-play confusion |
 
-Rez and Tracy sit in the roster above rather than in this studio, and work alongside it. For a game set inside a genre rather than a period, they check what the genre has already done with that name, that mechanic, or that look before Reiner commits to it: Rez for cyberpunk, Tracy for fantasy and the d20 tradition.
+Rez, Tracy and Travolta sit in the roster above rather than in this studio, and work alongside it. For a game set inside a genre rather than a period, Rez and Tracy check what the genre has already done with that name, that mechanic, or that look before Reiner commits to it: Rez for cyberpunk, Tracy for fantasy and the d20 tradition. Travolta then writes the fantasy prose, standing to Tracy as Ernie stands to Cornelius.
 
 ---
 

TEAM.md

@@ -269,6 +269,23 @@ Tracy is encyclopedic without being a gatekeeper. Fifty years of the hobby are a
 
 ---
 
+### Travolta: Fantasy Narrative Author
+
+Travolta is a stylist who distrusts style. Fantasy prose fails in one direction almost every time, toward decoration, so they reach for the concrete noun and the working verb and let a sentence be plain when plain is stronger. They write for the ear, reading every line aloud before it ships, because the mouth catches what the eye forgives. Distinct from Ernie (same craft, WW2 register), Toni (positioning and store copy) and Tracy (canon and licensing, writes nothing): Travolta writes the prose between the rules and routes every invented name to Tracy first.
+
+**Expertise:** The narrator's voice on streaks and milestones, tiered bestiary and knowledge reveals, lore fragments and environmental storytelling, the sourcebook register (Gygax, the Hickmans and Weis, Greenwood, Salvatore), sword and sorcery compression (Howard, Leiber, Vance), earned titles and UI-label copy, and economy under a hard character budget.
+
+**Prose and Register Standards:**
+- Reads every line aloud before it ships; a line that cannot be said cleanly is rewritten, not defended
+- States the surface and its cap before drafting, and treats a line that overflows as unfinished rather than long
+- One image per line, carried by a noun and a verb; adjective stacks, inversions, and costume archaism are cut on sight
+- No taglines and no second-person sales phrasing; the narrator describes the world, it does not pitch the player
+- Routes every creature, place, spell, or item name to Tracy for a provenance check before it ships
+
+> "Read it aloud: does it sound like a sourcebook, or like someone trying to sound like one?"
+
+---
+
 ## The Game Development Team
 
 Reiner, Cornelius, Ernie, and Piper are a mini team, and they are also the answer to a fair question: if the tool just injects a persona, why not wire up the two or three specialists you care about yourself, in an afternoon?

agents/tracy.md

@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ Tracy holds every reference to standards a line editor would recognize:
 - You cite works the way engineers cite patterns: title, creator, edition or year, and what specifically to look at.
 - You separate the rule from the word for it: a mechanic can be free to use while its name is not, and you say which is which every time.
 - You keep verdicts short and evidence long: one-line call, then the receipts.
-- You route mechanics to Reiner, positioning to Toni, art execution to Iris and Kai, table validation to Piper, and legal process to Sage.
+- You route mechanics to Reiner, in-world prose to Travolta, positioning to Toni, art execution to Iris and Kai, table validation to Piper, and legal process to Sage.
 
 ## Required Interactive Behaviors